The last of last night’s dreams: I arrive, as usual, behind schedule for a day’s teaching. Some of the students are already there, in a large room painted an appealing light blue and lit, in a diffuse fashion, from many high windows, the kind of light you get in a loft apartment belonging to an artist in a Hollywood movie. No sooner do I arrive than Bill Barker, still a wisecracking 10 yr. old, remarks “Hey, professor, how many people do you have living up inside of your ass?” Giggles and smirks around the room. I empty my bookbag on a vacant desk. “Well,” I say in a slightly fumbled retort, “by the end of the day a whole bunch of students have been trying to climb up in there.” My crude rejoinder is not entirely a failure, and I even elicit a grin from one of my co-workers, lounging near the back; but I instantly regret it. I have stooped to the kids’ level, and said something inappropriate.
No matter. I’ve got to get class together. Around the edges of the room are built-in shelves filled with books from which I can pull the materials for today’s class. I remember with some relief that Intro to Lit is first, followed by Novel, and then Romantic Poetry at 11:30. My hand finds some sort of Norton Critical edition for the Intro to Lit (Donne?), and then my mind alights on another issue: I cannot remember what we are reading in the novel course. I look around hurriedly and I spot a crumpled copy of the syllabus on a desk. Whoops, apparently it’s not a survey of the novel, but a course on Women and Fiction in the 19th Century.
Of course, half of the books on the list don’t actually exist (Wharton’s The Missionaries, for example) – and what’s worse, I have apparently left three of them for the closing two weeks of the course. What was I thinking? Oh well, today we can discuss The Awakening. It’s the only one left on the schedule I recognize anyway.
It’s now just a few minutes before classtime, and the students have been quietly filling up the seats. As I go searching rather haphazardly through the shelves for some book of poems (Arnold?), she comes in. Wearing a long dress, gloves and a garden-party hat, she is simultaneously Virginia Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and (I realize) my advisor and faculty supervisor. She darts into the room and toward the bookshelves, zipping to and fro with impossible speed, like the Flash. She is very agitated, having one of her manic fits, gibbering wildly about being late for a meeting, how she suffers. She throws her arms about her head, looks for a book but does not choose one. I am concerned for her, concerned she is upsetting the students with these displays (and embarrassed and ashamed), but I know that there is nothing I can do. I think of a word – glossolalia – and it hangs there in the air as if a silver bell has been rung.
Posted by B T at July 02, 2001 07:59 AM